Customer Profile
The Rostelecom is Russia's leading long-distance ISP and telephony provider. The company provides traditional fixed-line voice, mobile, data, cable TV and IPTV and value-added services to residential, corporate and governmental subscribers. Rostelecom has the largest domestic backbone network and last-mile connections to approximately 43 million households in Russia. Rostelecom consists of 8 units named macro regions each responsible for the dedicated territory of Russian Federation.
Business Challenge
Volga macro unit of Rosctelecom is covering 12 regions of Russia providing landline service to 5,6M+ subscribers, broadband servicer to 1,5 M+ subscribers and cable TV service to 500 K+ subscribers and IPTV service to 200 K+ subscribers. Volga’s last mile connections network are mix of copper, coaxial and fiber channels and access technologies (xDSL, DOCSIS, FTTH/FTTB, GPON, etc) with a numerous amount of multivendor equipment used.
Being the largest market share holder Rostelecom felt high pressure from the privately owned service providers, whose expansion caused migration of nonsatisfied subscribers especially in newly implemented services like pay TV, broadband access and mobile services. By the year 2004 all the 100K+ cities has at least 2-3 providers available in communities and condos, so subscribers got a choice of different services with averagely same price.
Quality of service has become the top priority to keep the subscribers or switching their preferences to another provider. Having the oldest and outdated infrastructure Rostelecom started losing its market share to newly-implemented more reliably operating providers.
Being unable to replace and modernize its infrastructure in a single step Rostelecom required a solution which would continuously monitor the quality of service provided from the subscriber’s point of view for the entire network – and so identifying the bottlenecks and service losses and degradation. At the same time solution should be able to monitor effects from network modernizations and estimate the efficiency of the actions taken. Security was also key priority as solution should operate on both private secured and public parts of Rostelecom’s network to provide the solid picture of through service quality.
Technology Solution
The solution is based on an IRWin Qos™ product. The monitoring network consists of several types of probes dedicated for simulating subscriber’s requests for services and measuring quality of service and subscriber’s experience:
The solution is deployed in all 12 regions with central server deployed at macro region headquarters. More than 36 000 objects of headend, core backbone and edge networks responsible for Rostelecom’s triple-play service have been set under the 24/7 monitoring – which covers >98% of total subscribers in the macro region. Highly configurable user policy let restricting access only to the user-role related data based on the organizational and territorial principles, sending targeted notifications and flexibly escalating the complex major issues detected. The solution is highly integrated into customer’s workflows and IT environment being capable of sending traps to NMS and reporting tickets to service desk when service fault or degradation is detected. Enhanced reporting system was developed with complex estimation of overall quality for everyservice provided helping keeping control over the modernization and optimization efforts and IT and service departments’ efficiency.
Business Value
With IRWin Qos™ system in place Rostelecom was able to identify the key bottlenecks and root causes of major service faults, perform highly precision and prioritized planning of IT and infrastructure modernization and keep live control over the eficiency of the investments spending and roadmap’s milestones achievements. For the past years quality of service provided has been greatly improved from average 1,7 in 2004 to 4,2 of 5 scores in 2012 (based on the overall service quality report which includes service availability, consistency and quality).
Preventive automated service degradation detection and 24/7 quality monitoring improves Rostelecom’s reputation among subscribers. Recent research has shown that in 2013 Rostelecom had finally got the pole position on Russian market in every of triple-play services provided. Proactive sales policy, customeroriented approach and quality as a top priority results in 300% growth in pay TV and 40% growth in broadband internet and 12% growth in mobile and land line telephony services in 2011-2013 years.
Migrating from device and infrastructure monitoring to service quality monitoring helps technical departments identifying key bottlenecks and properly prioritize modernization and improvement efforts and immediately control results from every enhancement applied for the overall service quality.